The Lady of Situations

by Louis Auchincloss

  “I think we shall get on together, Mrs. Barnes.”

  His use of the formal address signified the change in her status.

  “I hope so, sir.”

  “Have you been a secretary before?”

  “I’ve had some experience,” she fibbed.

  “In my letter to Mrs. Kingsford about her son, Jimmy, it occurs to me that I may have been too harsh. I suppose an adoring mother might object to the application of the term egotist’ to her son.”

  “Would ‘individualist’ be better?”

  “But that might be construed as a compliment!”

  “How about saying he has an individuality too pronounced for his years?”

  “Excellent! Write the letter over that way.”

  It was not more than a week before she was allowed herself to compose the routine correspondence: the letters of congratulation and condolence to the more distantly connected, the answers to simple inquiries, the replies to graduates who wrote giving news of their careers. And more and more now when he was dictating, he would pause to ask her to suggest an alternate word or phrase. But she was careful never to volunteer one.

  “You have a sense of style,” he told her after she had worked for him a month. “Have you done any writing yourself?”

  “Oh, I’ve scribbled a bit. Nothing too serious.”

  “I suppose every woman believes she has a novel in her.”

  She hesitated. Was this the moment for a bolder note? Was he challenging her? “Maybe that’s the only way we women have to live.”

  “You mean if one lives, one doesn’t have to write?” Those small red eyes seemed to bore into her. “What does Tommy think of your writing?”

  “I doubt he even knows about it. There isn’t, you see, anything much to know.”

  He grunted. “You’re smarter than Tommy.”

  “I trust, sir, that doesn’t mean you think little of my poor husband’s intellect.”

  “No, it doesn’t mean that at all. He had the sense to marry you, didn’t he?”

  She had no desire to write fiction at this point; she would be too busy gathering material out of which it might be made. For what was she but a spy in the holy of holies of a male society? Wasn’t it on the playing fields of Averhill that the battles of Wall Street were won? And then, too, she highly enjoyed her new position. She was somebody, even if a small somebody, on the campus now. When she saw other faculty wives wending their dreary way to and from chapel, or to and from the dining hall, she felt in contrast as if she were on a bobbing horse on a merry-go-round. It was all she could do to keep from waving gaily at them and crying out what a good time she was having. The headmaster being everything at Averhill, even his secretary was envied, as the valet who emptied the chamber pot of Louis XIV was envied by the greatest peers of France.

  Lockwood sometimes sent her as his messenger to faculty members with instructions about a change in schedule or the need of filling in for a sick or absent master. She was always careful never to allow the smallest note of authority to creep into the mild matterof-factness of her chosen tone. Indeed, one young master laughed in her face, exclaiming:

  “When I think of the difference between how that order must have been given and how it is transmitted! But don’t think we don’t appreciate it, Natica. We need a velvet glove for that iron hand.”

  Tommy did not know quite what to make of the change in their lives. He appreciated his own enhanced importance on campus as husband of one who enjoyed the headmaster’s confidence, but he was chagrined by the substitution of Lockwood for himself as the primary object of his wife’s preoccupation. And even a milder husband would have scarcely relished his spouse’s superior knowledge of school affairs.

  “I wouldn’t count too much on Sandy Rowe as assistant coach for the junior thirds.”

  “What makes you say that, dear?”

  “Between you and me I doubt the old man will renew his contract, come spring. He’s made some inquiries about a replacement.”

  “Natica, should you be telling me that?”

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  “Oh, I suppose so. But it seems kind of sneaky.”

  “Should husbands and wives have secrets from each other?”

  “Perhaps not. Only…”

  “We have your career to think of. If I keep my eyes and ears open, I may be able to help you quite a bit. Suppose another headmaster wants you on his faculty in a better position than you have here. It’s etiquette for him to channel his offer through your headmaster. Well, sometimes those offers get stuck to Lockwood’s desk. He writes back that he’s sorry, but so-and-so is just too happy at Averhill to think of leaving.”

  “Oh, Natica, he wouldn’t do that!”

  “How little you know him. That man would do anything under the sun he deemed in the best interests of his school. And with a clear conscience, too. Even a serene one! So you see, it’s to your interest to have a friendly hand opening his mail.”

  “Oh, darling, it’s great of you to want to help me, and I do appreciate it. But do you know what I’d rather have you do than anything connected with Dr. Lockwood or Averhill?”

  “Have a baby. I know. But I can’t think of that now. Just when I’m really getting started on this job.”

  “You don’t think starting our family is more important than writing Lockwood’s letters?”

  “Tommy, please! Give me time.”

  She saw by the sudden whiteness of his face that she had hurt him deeply, but she couldn’t help it. Despite her assurance to the contrary, there were plenty of things she had kept from him. One of them was that, with her growing cognizance of what it took to run a school, she was beginning to doubt his capacity for the job. Roy Evans, the senior master and Lockwood’s right hand, had qualities of tact, imagination and self-restraint that she now saw were lacking in her husband.

  Evans was certainly a very different person from his wife. Natica wondered how he could have married her. He was a quiet, serious, graying man, very thin, with an angular face of sharp lines and eyes of a remarkable gentleness. His deep voice inspired trust. He was always being consulted by Lockwood, often when Natica was within hearing, and he never raised his voice or showed the smallest impatience, even when the headmaster—a regular event—lost his temper.

  “But it’s right there in the paper, Roy!” She heard Lockwood excitedly slap his copy of the Boston Transcript. “Everett Perkins, drunk and disorderly, charged with assaulting a police officer. He’ll not only be thrown out of Harvard; he’ll be thrown in jail! And rightly so. No, sir, I shall not disregard it. I shall send him a stiff note this very morning informing him that he will not be welcome at Averhill for his class reunion this spring.”

  “I needn’t remind you, sir, that his father is a trustee, and a very generous one.”

  “No, you needn’t. You think of nothing but money, Roy. There have to be a few principles recognized, even by Boston banking families. That young man has had every advantage, every blessing, showered on his thick head since he was a baby. I prepared him for confirmation myself. Why, he’s even one of Mrs. Lockwood’s godchildren! And this is how he repays us!”

  “I’m not thinking so much of his father’s money as of his father’s broken heart. I think this may be the time for a gender word.”

  “I may indeed write a letter of sympathy to Everett senior. But we are speaking of his son. Only last winter, after that disgraceful incident in that New York nightclub, I wrote Ronnie Slater that he would not be a welcome visitor at Averhill for a year. And his was a far lesser offense.”

  “Perkins has only been charged with his offense, sir. Had we not better wait to learn if it is substantiated?”

  “President Conant did not deny it in his interview. Are you assuming that he doesn’t know what’s going on in his own university?”

  “Not at all, sir, but…”

  “That will be enough, Evans!”

  Lockwood dictated his stern letter to Na
tica when Evans had gone, but the latter returned to the office as soon as the headmaster had departed to his sacred studies class. Evans closed the door carefully behind him.

  “Natica, my friend, do us all a good turn. Don’t put that letter in the box till tomorrow. I think the old man is going to have a second thought.”

  She nodded in silent conspiracy, gratified by this further proof of her niche in the citadel. And indeed when Lockwood asked her the next morning, with seeming casualness, if the Perkins letter had gone out, he appeared mildly relieved to learn that it was still in her out basket. A small gleam in his eye might have revealed a suspicion, but a suspicion was not a reproof.

  ***

  Natica and Tommy were invited to tea at the Lockwoods’ after the Groton football game. It was a crowded affair, as Dr. Endicott Peabody attended with some thirty boys and masters from his own school. Natica was eager to see the famous “rector” of Groton, now almost eighty years old and a legend in New England education. The long parlor of the headmaster’s house, whose walls were covered with photographs of teams and crews and an occasional landscape, presumably of the Hudson River School, and whose elaborate if rather worn Belter chairs and divans were covered with young males, was dominated by the figure of Peabody, standing with his back to the fireplace, holding a teacup from which he took only a rare sip. He was big and balding and somehow square, and he stood very still and stolid, eyeing Lockwood with a pale gray twinkle behind which, at least on his own territory, might have always lurked the potentiality of a reprimand. He conveyed the impression that it meant very little that Groton had lost the game.

  “You’ve got a fine team, Rufus, and they played a fine game. Nobody minds losing when they have sport like that.”

  “But really, we take advantage of you, Cousin Cotty. We have twice the number of students to pick our team from.”

  Natica knew that Peabody was a cousin of Mrs. Lockwood, but the Averhill headmaster’s use of the tribal form of address still somehow struck her as hand rubbing: the butcher’s son claiming alliance with the Brahmin.

  “Numbers make no difference when every boy is worth his metal.”

  “Have you ever thought of enlarging Groton, Cousin Cotty? You could triple its size, I have no doubt, and still have a dozen applicants for every vacancy.”

  “No, I’ve always thought a hundred and eighty was the largest number of boys I could get to know personally. I’m sure with your famed memory, Rufus, you could increase Averhill to a thousand or more.”

  “You flatter me, sir. But I have thought that with a larger number one could afford to be more cosmopolitan.”

  “Cosmopolitan, eh? Is that what Averhill is, Rufus?”

  Natica likened the two in a sudden fantasy to the Kaiser and his uncle King Edward before the Great War. Lockwood clearly felt socially inferior to the bland, well-mannered and utterly unimpressed older relative; he was too smiling, too glittery-eyed, too glib, but he also had the greater intellect and the larger school. If Peabody had founded Groton, Lockwood had more than doubled Averhill.

  “We seek a more representative student body.” Lockwood now moved into territory that he considered more his own. “At Groton you draw boys principally from Boston and New York. Whereas here … well, take, for example, those present. I select at random. I even close my eyes. Answer with the name of your home town, boys, when I point to you.”

  With lowered eyelids he suddenly darted a long finger at the nearest row of Averhillians. The boys, amused, rang out their answers loudly. There were four “New York’s and three “Boston”s before he came at last to a feeble “Philadelphia.” The room burst into laughter.

  Lockwood opened his eyes wide and beamed, turning defeat into a joke. “You see, Cousin Cotty, what I mean! Here is a young man who must have reached his homestead in a covered wagon.”

  While Tommy that night at supper chatted about the game, going over some of the plays in tedious detail, Natica hardly pretended to listen. It no longer mattered that he bored her; she had developed her own interest in the school. It was really, she supposed, not so much an interest in Averhill as in what she could make of it. There it was, something real, something to hand, something that she could dramatize, even perhaps recreate.

  “Tommy,” she demanded suddenly, obliterating his analysis of a forward pass, “do you think Dr. Lockwood is a great man?”

  “Why, I never doubted it,” he said, surprised. “He has that reputation, surely.”

  “But do people see why he’s great? Do they see he’s a great actor? That he lampoons the world of which he has become the celebrated mentor because he sees … because he understands, let me put it, that there’s nothing he can do to make the smallest amount of sense out of it?”

  Tommy stared. “Are you trying to tell me that Dr. Lockwood doesn’t believe in Averhill?”

  “But is there really an Averhill to believe in?”

  “Well, if there isn’t, what on earth are we all doing here?”

  “A good question.”

  “Perhaps you’ve been seeing too much of the headmaster, sweetie. I know that at times he can exert a very confusing influence.”

  “Oh, never mind me, Tommy. I’m just playing games. Go back to your home runs.”

  “Home runs are in baseball, Natica.”

  The next morning when she came to the headmaster’s office she found Lockwood there ahead of her, standing by the window that faced the chapel and gazing out.

  “What did you think of the great Endicott Peabody?” he asked without turning.

  She had been sure he’d say something of the rector of Groton. “He struck me as belonging more to a Calvinist world than to ours. Didn’t they believe in signs of grace?”

  “You mean that his appearance or demeanor, or perhaps what he said or how he said it, gave you the hint he had been saved?”

  “That he was one of the elect. That he had been chosen, even before he was born, for salvation.”

  Lockwood turned to face her; his face was craggy with gloom. King Lear, she thought. Or was it Dr. Johnson? He seemed to gaze through her as he intoned:

  “When you see Peabody in the pulpit in raiment white and glistering, waving a long arm and uttering his sonorous banalities, don’t you feel that a Salem Peabody could hang a hundred witches and still be saved? What was it that Saint-Simon said of some dying duke: ‘Le Bon Dieu will think twice before damning a man of that pedigree’? Peabody seems to have been put on earth for the express purpose of showing us what it is to be saved.”

  “You mean as a kind of taunt?”

  “Or as a reminder of the damnation to which the rest of us may have been committed.”

  “We were discussing that at Mrs. Evans’s cercle. The ladies couldn’t understand how Calvinists could have believed anything so dreadful.”

  Lockwood chuckled. “Poor little souls, how it must have scared them! A lifetime of teas and gossip and household chores and then … the flames of hell!”

  “But Mrs. Evans can be sure of her own salvation. She has all the signs.”

  “Perhaps too many of them.”

  He turned back to the window as if to reconsider the enigmatic message of the chapel tower. He offered no mitigation of the rigor of his comment on Marjorie Evans; she was clearly beneath his further thought. After a few moments of silence she offered:

  “But would heaven be any happier?”

  “You mean with all those harps and golden streets? Eternity, one assumes, would make joy and pain coevals. I don’t profess to know about heaven, but surely hell is not so remote. One of our graduates who came up to school last week was telling me of the prison camps in Germany. He goes to Berlin on business and has one or two friends there who aren’t afraid to speak out in private. The sadism, they say, is beyond belief. Wretched Jews are stripped and beaten and starved. I had a nightmare about it last night.”

  “You dreamed you were a prisoner?”

  He whirled around to glare at her. “No,
it was a real nightmare. I was a guard!”

  She made no reply, and he was at once the headmaster again, very dry and crisp. “Take a letter to school counsel. ‘My dear Alfred: I have been told that under a new Massachusetts statute we are now required to file annual reports as to…’”

  ***

  On winter afternoons, when the weather was dark and blowy, and the headmaster, who was subject to heavy head colds, chose to stay inside, she would be sometimes called to his study at home where he would dictate long paragraphs for future sermons or addresses in seemingly random order as they occurred to him. Soon her notebook was full of these anecdotes and observations, and at the end of a session she hazarded the suggestion that they might make a book.

  “But who would read them?” he growled.

  “Well, your graduates, to begin with. You taught them when they were young. Why not go on teaching them?”

  “I taught them nothing!”

  “Nothing?”

  “That’s right. We don’t teach the boys anything at Averhill. Oh, we try of course. We do our best to drum things into their heads. But their resistance is like that Maginot Line in northern France, an impenetrable wall of turrets. How many of them will read a great poem, or even a great novel, after graduation? How many will go to church, or speak more than hotel French, or ponder the mysteries of the universe? How many will dissect a frog? How many will care for anything but girls and games and the great god Dollar?”

  “But isn’t it the exceptional boy that the system is designed to produce? What about Elijah Cabot? Isn’t he one of our greatest poets?”

  “But Averhill didn’t even touch Elijah! He loathed the school.”

  “Well, maybe that in itself was his inspiration.”

  “On the theory that brutal parents and schools produce great artists? Dickens and that blacking factory? A noble function, isn’t it? But we still don’t teach. Elijah would have read poetry if he’d been beaten black and blue every time he was found with a sonnet in his hand. It sometimes seems to me, Natica, that we are caught in the devilish vise of a conformity that makes use of our very protests to fool society into believing it is free!”